Here below, a description is given of the prior art pertaining to the prediction of images in the field of the encoding or decoding of image sequences.
There already exist known hybrid video encoding schemes wherein the images are encoded in two phases, the first phase being a phase of prediction by motion compensation followed by a second phase of encoding of prediction residues.
Among the motion compensation techniques, there is the known method of motion compensation known as “backward motion compensation”, an example of which is illustrated schematically in FIG. 1A. Backward motion compensation enables the prediction of an image Ic from at least one reference image Ir taking account of the shift vectors pointing from the current image to one or more reference images.
This prediction comprises two steps:                the image to be predicted Ic is sub-divided into a set of blocks;        for each block of this image, a prediction is made by means of a shift vector pertaining to a shift relative to the reference image Ir.         
Thus, this prediction operation amounts to shifting every point of a block of the reference image by the value of the shift vector associated with the considered block, and makes it possible to give a prediction value to each point of the image to be predicted. A point of the image to be predicted corresponds classically to a pixel.
There is also another known motion compensation technique known as “forward motion compensation”, an example of which is illustrated schematically in FIG. 1B.
Forward motion compensation enables the prediction of an image Ic from at least one reference image Ir taking account of the shift vectors pointing from one or more reference images Ir to the current image Ic. 
This prediction comprises two steps:                the reference image Ir is sub-divided into a set of reference blocks;        for each reference block of the reference image, a shift is made and for each point of this block, the value of the point of the reference image, shifted by the shift vector is allocated to the point of the image to be predicted Ic.         
One drawback of this motion compensation technique known as forward motion compensation is that it causes the appearance of overlap zones when several blocks overlap each other, denoted as R in FIG. 1B. Furthermore the use of different shifts on the forward projected blocks also gives rise to non-overlap zones between the blocks, denoted D in FIG. 1B.
The absence of allocation of values in the non-overlap zones limits the performance of the proposed encoding scheme.
The problem of rebuilding values in these non-overlap zones is a well known problem of restoration called “inpainting”.
Several solutions have been proposed to this problem.
For example, the document “Fast Texture Synthesis using Tree-structured Vector Quantization”, (L. Y. Wei, M. Levoy, Proceedings of the SIG-GRAPH 2000, pp 479-488, July 2000), introduces the technique known as “template matching”. This technique makes use of the search for a similar pattern in a reference image from known observations in a neighborhood of the zone to be rebuilt.
This technique has three steps:                defining a “template” of information already known in the neighborhood of a set of pixels to be rebuilt (2×2 sized block in the image in the cited document);        searching in a search zone for a zone similar to the template (candidate neighborhood);        assigning, to the pixels to be rebuilt, values of the block associated with the most similar zone sought.        
The document “Intra prediction by template matching”, (T. K. Tan, C. S. Boon, Y. Suzuki, Proceedings of the ICIP 2006, pp 1693-1696), extends this technique to an H.264 encoder in intra mode. This technique offers high quality of restoration.
However, one drawback of these prior art techniques is the complexity of their implementation which requires a search for a “template” to be used, this search being made through techniques of searching for the maximum of the correlation product from amongst a large number of candidates. Thus, this technique has a complexity that is too high to be effective.